It's September 2019 and there are at least six living vaquitas on Earth. That matters.

Scientists have found six living vaquitas. This is a big big deal, and I have conflicting feelings.  

On the one hand, the animal is almost extinct (estimated less than twenty left), there is no captive population and it's too late to build one (attempts to capture a vaquita a few years ago resulted in it dying, which isn't worth the risk with such a small population). It is very likely to go extinct even if every formal protection were actually enacted, which isn't the case (totoaba is still illegally fished and vaquita get caught in the totoaba nets). Even if there really are 30 animals or slightly more, that's well below the threshold for genetic sustainability, and even if numbers somehow recovered in the short term, the species would be in big trouble in the long-term. We're spending a lot of time and money that should have been spent 20 years ago, and maybe should go to species we have a better chance of saving now.

On the other hand, I'm really excited about this.

 I'm glad that scientists and nations are putting the effort in, and I'm struggling to justify why. Firstly, (although the article mentions six were also seen last year) we've gone a while without an announcement that anyone has actually seen a vaquita, and while population estimates have been declining from 60-30 (I had also heard 20) over the past few years, I haven't been sure what they've been based on. So just knowing at least six are still out there is exciting, for some reason. It's an affective attachment, as environmental humanities scholars say. I've never seen a vaquita, I probably never will, but I care, I don't know why, I just care. It feels like hope, even if it's temporary, even though I'm not sure what hope in an age of extinction really means.

It also feels like it matters that they're in a pod together and frolicking in pairs - cetaceans are highly social and extinction like many ways of dying seems inherently anti-social. I'm reminded of David Quammen's metaphor of a Persian carpet cut into tiny pieces - habitats are split up, populations are isolated, communities become islands of isolated individuals. On one level this is true. Every species that goes extinct, which is over 99% of all species that ever lived, technically has a last surviving individual. In the words of Capt. Mal Reynolds from Firefly, everyone dies alone.

But maybe we don't have to live alone as we're dying. We can be together, and we can bear witness.

This is what Donna Haraway means by "staying with the trouble" - not turning our gaze but finding ethical ways of living and dying together. They won't be perfect. They might not be enough. Maybe we're doing it for ourselves and not the animals. But that's ok. We need to try.
The results matter, but the trying matters too.

We just have to not look away.